Room That Forgot Itself

“The room didn’t have ghosts—but it knew how to remember people like it had eaten them.”

Room Four didn’t look like a room at all.

It looked like something forgotten. A storage unit on the edge of the world, a box someone had meant to do something with and then… hadn’t. Maybe they’d run out of money. Maybe they’d run out of time. Or maybe they’d just stopped caring. The walls were meant to be cream, I think, but had faded into the vague colour of old paper—stained and freckled with rust, especially near the hinges, where it bloomed in orange-brown patches like some kind of strange, creeping flower. Tiny flakes of metal clung to the cracks, clinging to the surface like they didn’t want to give in entirely to decay.

The door was worse.

It had peeled in long, curled strips, the top layer of paint rolling back like sunburnt skin, revealing patches of bare, splintered timber beneath. The number—4—had once been hand-painted in thick white, but most of it had worn away, leaving a wonky crescent where the curve of the four used to be. It looked more like a question mark now. Like the room itself wasn’t entirely sure who it was anymore.

Above it, a single light flickered in its wire cage, buzzing faintly like an insect trapped behind glass. It didn’t offer much in the way of brightness—just enough to cast uncertain shadows and blink in a pattern that felt almost deliberate. Like it was trying to communicate, like it wanted to warn us off. Go back, it seemed to say, one flicker at a time. Not here. Not this one.

The step was cracked, a jagged fault line that split the concrete clean through the middle. Weeds had taken up residence in the break, their wiry green stems poking out like antennae, vibrating gently in the still air. Little mounds of red dust had gathered at the corners, like sand pushed into place by an invisible broom, reminders that the desert wasn’t outside—it was everywhere. It was in everything.

Mum stepped forward, holding the key with both hands now like she didn’t trust it not to betray her. She pushed it into the lock and wiggled it sharply, her mouth tight, her words low and fast and meant for herself more than us. The metal scraped and ground in protest. I winced at the sound, the shriek of reluctant mechanisms that hadn’t been turned in far too long.

“Come on,” she muttered, mostly to the door. “Come on, don’t do this now.”

It stuck once, twice—then gave, suddenly and all at once, with a dull thunk that echoed into the quiet and made me jump. The door creaked open on warped hinges, breathing out a gust of air that felt damp even though everything outside had been bone dry for hours.

The smell hit me first.

It had layers—like stories, or arguments that hadn’t quite resolved. The strongest was dust, but not dry and fresh like when you wipe a surface and it puffs into the air. This dust was wet, somehow—clinging and musty, full of history. Then came something sharper, like old Dettol and tarnished copper coins, tangy and metallic and stale. I breathed in through my mouth, but that didn’t help. Underneath it all was something softer, sadder: the scent of curtains and upholstery that had absorbed a hundred different bodies over a hundred restless nights. Sweat and soap and old cigarette smoke woven deep into the fabric.

Mum stood in the doorway for a moment, frozen. The light from inside poured out and painted her in stripes of yellow and shadow. I could see the tension in her shoulders again—the way she was bracing, as if for bad news. Like there might be something on the other side of the threshold that would confirm her worst fears.

For just a second, I thought she might turn around. Might slam the door, head back to the car, and keep driving through the night until the tyres wore down to the rims.

But she didn’t.

She stepped inside, her footsteps hollow on the thin, echoey floorboards, the sound bouncing off walls we couldn’t see yet. The room swallowed her. The door creaked wider, like it was sighing in resignation. I looked up at Mack. He didn’t say anything, but he nodded once—just a little—and then he followed her into the kind of room that feels more like a pause than a destination.

I hesitated in the doorway, clutching Ribbons tight to my chest, her matted fur pressed close against the wool of my jumper. The transition between worlds—the clean chill of the outback night and the thick, stagnant air inside—was so stark it made my skin prickle. It was like stepping through a membrane into a space where time moved differently, where air didn’t flow properly and sounds didn’t bounce the way they should. My eyes had to adjust, not just to the dimness, but to the peculiar wrongness of it all.

The light came from a single globe, yellow and swollen like an infected eye, hanging from the ceiling by a twisted cord that made me nervous just to look at. It buzzed quietly—not a steady hum, but a nervous, erratic sound, like it was trying to communicate but didn’t know the right words. Maybe insects made the noise, or maybe it was the bulb itself, alive with some low, electrical distress. Its light poured across the room in tired waves, catching on metal, cloth and dust, turning every object into something a little warped, a little ill.

Two beds waited like forgotten patients in a ward nobody staffed anymore. Metal frames, scraped and pitted with rust in places, supported mismatched mattresses that didn’t seem to have much energy left. One sagged so dramatically in the centre that I imagined it breathing—a long, defeated exhale that had started years ago and never quite finished. The other was slightly better, but its blanket had surrendered to age, the colour now the indecisive hue of weak tea or dishwater. Nothing about it looked warm. Two pillows, one on each bed, sat like deflated lungs, their stuffing rearranged by dozens of heads into awkward clumps that defied comfort or symmetry.

Between the beds stood a squat little bedside table, its laminate peeling at the corners to reveal the coarse chipboard beneath. A lamp sat crookedly on top, its ceramic base patterned with faded daisies, though most had rubbed away. The lampshade drooped like a hat left out in the rain too long—its fabric discoloured and puckered, yellowing not from time alone but from the long-ago breath of strangers: smoke, sighs, whispered arguments in the dark.

The carpet under my shoes didn’t deserve the name. It was more suggestion than substance, worn so thin in places that I could see the hessian weave beneath, especially near the threshold where boots must have scraped past again and again. A dark patch in the far corner caught my eye—spidery, irregular, the kind of stain that told a story I didn’t want to hear. The sort of mark that lingered, unspoken, beneath every coat of paint or layer of cleaner, because it had soaked deep enough to be remembered by the floor itself.

The walls, if anything, were worse. Once-cream paint now veered dangerously close to grey, with odd smudges that might have been fingerprints, grease, or mould, depending on where you looked. One patch near the door had what looked like a shoe scuff high up, which made no sense unless someone had kicked out in anger, or had fallen, or—

I stopped myself. I didn’t want to imagine.

Behind me, I felt the cold tug of outside, the night still fresh with stars and space. In here, it felt like everything had been breathing the same stale air for too long. Ribbons was clutched so tightly in my arms I felt her seams press into my skin.

I didn’t want to go in.

But I knew we would.

We always did.

Mum dropped the bags by the nearest bed without ceremony. They landed with a soft, resigned thump against the tired carpet, the sound dulled as though even the floor was too exhausted to react. She rubbed her face with both hands, fingers pressing into the sockets of her eyes like she could scrub the worry away through sheer pressure. In the jaundiced glow of the ceiling light, she looked wrong—drained and colourless, like someone who’d wandered out of a painting left too long in the sun. The lines on her face seemed deeper, her expression blurred by fatigue and thoughts she wasn’t sharing.

I watched her for a moment, trying to imagine what it felt like to carry the full weight of our journey alone—every decision, every risk, every kilometre. Maybe that was why she looked like she'd been hollowed out from the inside. Maybe she'd poured too much of herself into keeping us moving.

Mack hovered just inside the door, his body language guarded, shoulders set in a way that suggested alertness rather than rest. His eyes swept the room like a scanner, noting the sag in the mattress, the dust gathered in corners, the flaking paint on the skirting board. He was already working out where we'd put our bags, where we’d sleep, what we should avoid touching if we could help it.

His gaze flicked to the kitchenette in the corner, and mine followed. It barely deserved the name. The sink was streaked with rust and stained with old mineral deposits, the kind that left rings like tree growths marking years of neglect. A small fridge hummed unevenly in the corner, like an old man snoring, the metal door dented and streaked with grime that had resisted even the most perfunctory cleans. Above it, a cupboard hung crooked on its hinges, its handle worn to a shine by years of uncertain hands.

Mum reached up and opened it. The hinges gave a tortured creak, loud enough to set my teeth on edge. Inside: one mug, chipped and patterned with the kind of floral print you only ever saw in motels or op shops; two plates, one cracked and the other mismatched entirely; and a single teaspoon that looked like it had been run over, the handle bent at an odd angle as if it had tried to escape and failed.

She stared at it all for a second—then just closed the cupboard gently. She didn’t say anything. No sigh. No muttered commentary. Just silence, as if even the energy for complaint had abandoned her.

I stepped forward and laid Ribbons on the bed nearest the wall—the one with the thinnest blanket. She looked out of place here, her bright fur dulled by the room’s lifeless tones, like a splash of colour in a black-and-white photo. When I sat beside her, the mattress groaned loudly, springs shifting beneath me like bones that hadn’t moved in years. It made a sound like someone letting out a long-held breath, and for a second I imagined the bed itself sighing at yet another family passing through, another night of restless sleep and whispered fears.

The blanket scratched my palms. It smelled faintly of bleach and old body odour, the chemical scent not quite strong enough to hide what had seeped in beneath it—years of strangers, of stories not mine, of weight and warmth and nightmares. I pulled it over my knees anyway, tucking it under my legs in that automatic way that children do when they’re trying to make unfamiliar places feel less foreign.

“Bathroom’s in here,” Mack called, as he nudged open a flimsy door that didn’t quite fit its frame. The light switch made a loud clack when he flicked it, but nothing happened at first. Then, after a pause, the light buzzed into life—sickly, intermittent, flickering like it wasn’t entirely convinced it wanted to stay on.

“You want to wash up?” he asked, not looking at me.

I shook my head. The idea of being in that room alone made something shift uncomfortably in my stomach.

He went in anyway, the door swinging shut behind him with a whine. I listened as the tap sputtered into life—an ugly, choking noise, like the pipes were waking up angry. A groan followed, deep in the walls, like the whole place was sighing in protest. Then the water came, a rush of liquid that smelt instantly metallic and sharp, like blood and old coins.

I looked at Ribbons. Her button eyes caught the flickering ceiling light, making her seem briefly alive. I pulled her into my lap and hugged her tightly, not because I was scared, exactly—but because I wasn’t sure what else to hold onto.

Mum sat on the edge of the other bed, still wrapped in her coat like armour, as though shedding it might also shed the protective layer she’d constructed around herself. Her boots remained laced, soles flecked with red dust, their presence on the worn carpet incongruous and stubborn, like a declaration that this stop was temporary, not to be settled into. The coat sagged around her shoulders in heavy folds, fabric that once fit now too big, too loose. I hadn’t noticed until now just how much smaller she'd become—less like the indomitable figure who could fix broken zips and make tough decisions, and more like someone hollowed out by the weight of too many choices and not enough sleep.

She didn’t lie back or even shift position. She just sat, elbows on thighs, her hands gripped tightly together between her knees. Her knuckles were white, fingers interwoven as though they were the only thing still holding her together. Her gaze was fixed on the blank wall opposite—flat, featureless, yellowed slightly by age—yet she stared at it as though it held something crucial, a code she hadn’t cracked, or a sign she was waiting to appear.

The heater in the corner gave a mechanical cough and sputtered to life, tick-tick-tick… click. It began to exhale warmth in weak gusts, a tired breath rather than a blaze. The metal popped and pinged as it expanded, each sound sharp in the silence. The room filled with the acrid tang of burning dust, that dry, scorched smell of old skin cells and lint meeting heat for the first time in months. The warmth barely reached my ankles. The air beyond it remained cold, dense with a dampness that suggested the insulation was only a suggestion and not a promise.

I slipped off my jacket, folding it neatly and placing it at the foot of the bed. The act felt like a ritual, a moment of order in a world that had forgotten what order looked like. I climbed under the rough blanket, flinching slightly as it touched bare skin beneath my sleeves. It itched, not with any specific irritation, just a general scratchiness that spoke of overuse and too many trips through harsh commercial laundries.

Ribbons lay beside me, her stitched face turned toward the ceiling. Her ear, the one still intact, flopped over onto the pillow like it was trying to catch a whisper. I imagined her listening—not to us, but to the past, to the muffled echoes of all the lives that had come through this room. Conversations had happened here. Arguments. Reconciliations. Despair. Maybe even hope, once or twice. I wondered if the walls remembered them, if the faded paint absorbed those moments and held them the way fabric holds scent.

Mack returned from the bathroom, his movements slow and deliberate. He didn’t say anything at first, just knelt beside our bags, unzipping one of them with a soft, careful sound. From its depths he produced the sum total of what remained: the packet of stale crackers we’d been picking at, resealed so often the plastic had stopped sticking properly; the bruised apple that rolled slightly on the bedside table once he put it down, as if trying to escape its fate; and the crushed biscuits in their crumpled packaging, the ones I’d half-forgotten were still with us.

He arranged them on the table like they mattered. Like placing them just so would make them more nourishing, or more plentiful, or less sad. There was something almost reverent in his movements, a gentleness that didn’t match the hard edges of the world we found ourselves in.

“Bathroom smells like old soup,” he said eventually, his tone light, almost absentminded.

The comment should have been funny—should have lifted the mood in that dark, threadbare way siblings sometimes manage—but it landed strangely, as if even humour now had too sharp an edge to be safe. No one laughed. Mum didn’t blink. I just stared at the ceiling and tried to imagine what kind of soup he meant.

Thick and grey, maybe. Canned and long forgotten. Like the air in this room—warm in places, cold in others, and full of things no one wanted to name.

Mum finally moved. Just a small motion—barely more than a shift in gravity—but it felt significant, the first flicker of energy after what had seemed like an endless stillness. She raised her arms with effort, fingers fumbling at the base of her skull as she tugged at the elastic holding her hair. The tie snapped free with a soft flick, and her hair dropped in tired, uneven waves across her shoulders, limp and dull in the sickly yellow light. The strands clung together with the weight of sweat and stress, lacking their usual bounce. I remembered, distantly, how it used to gleam in the sun when she laughed—how, back then, she used to laugh.

Her gaze found Mack, but not easily. It was like she had to push her eyes into focus, like her brain couldn’t quite catch up with where he was in the room. She looked at him the way people look at things on distant hills, as if the detail had been swallowed by the space in between.

“Go have a walk around the place if you want,” she said, her voice scraped raw of all emotion. “Just stay where I can see you.”

It wasn’t freedom—it was precaution disguised as permission. Her words bore the unspoken caveat that this was not a place where children could wander unattended. Even here, in a town so small it barely qualified as one, the need to keep each other close had become rule, not preference.

Mack didn’t move right away. His eyes flicked to the window, where the grime turned the outside world into a murky smear of shapes and shifting light, then to the door with its dented handle and rusted lock. He didn’t speak. Eventually, he reached over, picked up the bruised apple, and sat down on the bed. His bite into it was loud, the crunch reverberating like an argument. He chewed methodically, the sound rhythmic and deliberate, like chewing was something that had to be done carefully now, just in case even that could go wrong.

I shifted onto one elbow, the bed springs squealing beneath me with an almost human complaint, and looked over at Mum.

“Do we sleep here all night?” I asked, my voice thinner than I meant it to be. The question was practical on the surface, but inside it curled with fear—fear of whether we'd be safe here, of what the dark might bring, of whether sleep was something we could still afford.

“Yes,” Mum said. The word was flat, definitive. A verbal full stop. She didn’t elaborate.

“Are we going again tomorrow?”

She nodded once. The movement was subtle, a tiny dip of her chin that felt like it cost her something. Her eyes stayed locked on the opposite wall, and for a second I had the strange thought that maybe she was talking to it instead of us, trying to convince it—or herself—that there was still a plan.

“Where to?”

The question slipped out like breath, impossible to hold back any longer. It had been knocking at the inside of my skull for hours, and now it was in the room with us, buzzing faintly with all the other things we couldn’t talk about.

But she didn’t answer.

Her gaze didn’t flick to me. Her body didn’t move. It was as if she hadn’t even heard it—or maybe she had, and the decision not to respond was louder than any words she could have offered.

Above us, the light hummed louder, its flicker now less a gentle pulse and more a tremor, like it too was tired of pretending everything was fine. Outside, noise drifted from the pub—the deep rise and fall of male voices soaked in beer and bravado, laughter that bordered on belligerent, like it could turn to shouting without warning. A pool cue cracked against a table. Laughter again, high-pitched and slightly off. The kind of sounds that suggested people forgetting their troubles one drink at a time, even if just for a few hours.

“Is this what hotels are like?” I asked, the words small and hesitant. I didn’t mean fancy ones, just the normal kind. The ones people stayed in during holidays. The ones I’d seen in magazines and once on a school friend's phone, in pictures from a family trip to the coast.

Mack snorted—short and dry, like the air itself. “Not the good ones.”

His voice wasn’t unkind. Just resigned. A shared joke between people who’d lowered their standards to fit reality.

Mum’s mouth twitched. It might’ve been a smile. Or the ghost of one. It hovered there for a moment before her face returned to its hollow stillness. She rubbed her arms, her hands moving up and down like she was trying to warm herself through sheer friction, the way you do when you’re too tired to get up and find a blanket. The one at the end of her bed remained untouched, a square of folded fabric that somehow felt like a line she couldn’t cross.

The silence that followed wasn’t empty. It had weight. Texture. It filled the room like water in a sinking boat—rising slowly, filling every corner until even breathing felt like disruption. I wanted to speak, to ask something trivial just to prove that we still could, but the silence dared me not to. Dared all of us not to.

So I pulled the blanket up to my chest and closed my eyes instead.

But I didn’t sleep.

Mum stood up with the kind of slowness that came not from laziness or reluctance, but from fatigue so deep it had settled into her bones. She moved like her joints had rusted on the drive, every step a quiet negotiation between mind and body. Without a word, she crossed the room toward the bathroom, her coat still hanging from her shoulders, her boots scuffing softly on the tired floor as if she'd forgotten they were on.

The bathroom door clicked shut behind her—just a small sound, but in the quiet, it rang out like the final note of something important. A door closing on more than just a room.

Then we heard the tap.

That same reluctant plumbing protest—a rattle, a groan, the pipes yawning as if resentful of being disturbed. The water ran for only a few seconds. Then nothing. No footsteps, no shifting floorboards, no sound of cupboard doors or the soft thud of a towel taken down. Just stillness. A silence so complete it felt unnatural, like the bathroom had swallowed her.

I looked at Mack.

He looked back.

The light cast harsh angles across his face, shadowing one eye and exaggerating the set of his jaw, as if the quiet was chiselling years into him one flickering second at a time. He didn’t look like a ten-year-old. Not then. He looked like someone carrying something too heavy for someone that small, too aware for someone that young.

We didn’t speak for a long moment. We just looked at each other and listened to the absence of sound.

Then, barely above the whisper of the heater’s ticking, he said, “She’s not herself.”

I nodded. Not quickly. Slowly, deliberately, because I knew he was right. Knew it in the way you know a storm is coming before the sky changes, in the way animals sense danger before the first sound. Something had shifted. Not just in Mum’s expression or her posture, but in the space around her. Like the gravity had changed. Like the air itself responded differently when she moved through it.

“She’s tired,” I said, reaching for the explanation that felt safest to say aloud, even though the words tasted unconvincing in my mouth. I hugged Ribbons tighter. “That’s all.”

“Yeah.” But Mack’s agreement was hollow. The kind you give when you know the truth sits somewhere else, heavier and harder, just out of reach.

He looked toward the bathroom door again, his eyes narrowing slightly, as if trying to see through the thin wood, to decode whatever silence lay behind it. He didn’t move from the bed. Neither of us did.

I sank back down onto my pillow, the fabric gritty against my cheek, and pulled the rough blanket up to my chin. The mattress didn’t give—it accepted me like a burden rather than a guest, its lumpy shape moulding to my back in all the wrong places. Ribbons lay curled in the crook of my arm, and I pressed my lips against the top of her head like she might absorb some of my worry, like she could carry it for me.

Mack shifted once, then stilled.

The room seemed to exhale around us, a long, invisible breath of held tension. Then silence again. Deep. Total. The kind that makes you aware of your heartbeat, of the blood moving through your own ears.

The heater clicked once more, metal ticking softly as the element dimmed and reignited in its endless loop. That was the only thing marking time in here. Not clocks. Not daylight. Just that slow mechanical rhythm, as if even time itself had lost interest in passing properly.

Outside, the pub had quietened. The laughter was gone. No more pool cue cracks or shouted jokes. Just the wind now, brushing past the buildings with long, low sighs, stirring the weeds outside our door. I imagined empty beer glasses still sitting on the bar, cooling in the absence of hands, the echoes of voices trapped in the rafters like smoke.

And still, no sound from the bathroom.

The wall felt too thin, the air too heavy. And all of it—the stillness, the fatigue, the questions we couldn’t ask—felt like it was holding its breath along with us. Waiting. For what, I didn’t know.

But something.